Well-Read Lives: How Books Inspired a Generation of American Women (review)

The relationship between young women and their books, especially novels, has often prompted censure and mobilized the forces of social control. Well-Read Lives, a beautifully written synthesis of incisive theoretical insights and detailed research, shows a different side of that relationship. It illuminates the literary culture of the Gilded Age and the lives of young readers such as Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells, whose passion for books enabled them to imagine consequential lives and to write themselves into the public sphere of the Progressive Era. Significantly, Sicherman’s analysis deepens our understanding of the nature of reading itself, exuding some of the very magic that books clearly held for these young women. For them, the practice of reading was a transformative exercise that “encouraged imaginative freedom and new self-definitions,” revealing the existence of possibilities beyond the well-worn but limited pathways of domestic life (3).

The effectiveness of Sicherman’s book rests principally on the quality of her scholarship. Her research into primary texts is extraordinarily resourceful and meticulous, exhausting archives, diaries, letters, and autobiographies. She demonstrates a deep understanding of the social and cultural dynamics of the historical period as well as a substantial theoretical grounding in the study of reading, in feminist theory, and in developmental psychology. The range of primary texts quoted allows readers intimate access to the formative years of several exceptional women and demonstrates how reading fired their imaginations. Sicherman’s skillful historical contextualization helps us to understand the broad landscape of social structures and cultural meanings that surrounded and shaped their struggles to become something different from what the world expected of them, whether those expectations pointed to a life of genteel idleness or of less privileged status as African American, immigrant, or working class. The text’s considerable and diverse theoretical foundation demonstrates how the practice of reading intertwines with what Simone de Beau-voir would have called the project of becoming a woman: These women did not drift with the norm; they envisioned and enacted unconventional lives.

Often Sicherman’s theoretical discernment arises from interrogating literary or social scientific generalizations with historical data, which allows her to revise taken-for-granted views about both women and reading. For instance, she queries the “conventional assumption that women respond to fiction principally through . . . identification with heroines of romantic plots” by showing in fascinating detail that it was men in the Hamilton family (whose young people were all intensely involved in literary pursuits) who were captivated by romantic heroines, whereas it was “other sorts of plots, plots of adventure and social responsibility, that appealed to the Hamilton women” (99–100). This approach means that her book brings life not only to the people and processes she studies but also to theoretical work itself. Sicherman’s emphasis on theoretical practice as creative play between conceptualization and realization fundamentally challenges so-called normative methodologies that privilege hierarchies and linearity.

This lightness of touch is especially evident in the chapter titled “Reading Little Women.” Here Sicherman details encounters between that book and a number of quite different young women, from immigrants to daughters of privilege. Using their own words, she shows that following readers’ actual responses to this book yields a series of interesting theoretical perceptions about the nature of reading. For example, she notes that in some cases readers’ “aspiration[s] mattered more than actual social position[s], so often considered the major determinant of reading practices” (16). Similarly, despite claims that Little Women disciplines its characters into domesticity, readers’ actual engagement with the book in the context of their own desires and dreams show it to be a text “that opens up new avenues for readers rather than fore-closing them” (18). The myriad ways readers engaged with the book also make it clear that Little Women has been able to perform “different cultural work for diverse reading communities” (34). Thus this chapter leads...